Kidnapped Conn. ex-wife doubted survival chances (AP)

[Yahoo!_news]

AP - An advertising executive's former wife who police say was held hostage by her ex-husband for hours inside his Connecticut home told a newspaper she did not expect to survive the ordeal, which ended when he allegedly set the house on fire after she escaped.

"I truly don't know why he didn't kill me," Nancy Tyler said in Thursday's editions of The Day of New London. "I was lying against the wall thinking, 'I'm going to let him do it.'"

Tyler, 57, spent most of Tuesday handcuffed to Richard Shenkman, some of that time in a basement bunker he had created in the South Windsor house. She said he had piles of paperwork downloaded from the Internet on how to kill himself and told police negotiators he would blow up his two-story house with 65 pounds of explosives.

"He kept saying, 'We've got to blow the house and we're going to do it from the bunker and we'll live,'" Tyler said in a telephone interview Wednesday with the newspaper.

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